Andrew’s Crux Point
My Crux Point? We make so much happen in our life, experience so much, pursue so many interests. Yet there's really only a handful of big, life changing moments. Funny how that works. The rest are simply inputs that affect how we view the world.
When I reflect on those major periods in my life, four truly life changing forks in the road come to mind. I'll speak to one of them.
I started my career in technology as a teenager, not by design. I got involved with a startup just after high school and fell in love with the concept of bringing something new into the world, with all of its flaws. Slowly turning that new thing from a toy, into a company, into a real business that could stand the test of time. That initial infatuation spanned the course of 15 years (I'll save you the chronology of it) without much regard for my own well being, the people around me that I cared most about, and whether future me would be proud of what I dedicated my life to up to that point.
Then 2020 came around and I got a major wake up call. Like all of us, I experienced the pandemic. But mine came with another layer that reshaped everything about me, including my own health. In March of 2020 I got COVID, pre-vaccine and pre-understanding what it was. It landed me in the hospital for months and left me with lung and immune system damage that will likely never resolve. I struggle with the result of that to this day, every day. As I sat in the hospital bed, looking around at hundreds of people suffering and dying around me, it shook me. At that time, families weren't allowed to enter the hospital. I was left fully alone without any sense of whether I'd survive. The urgent calls, the gasping for air, the tears. It's something I'll never be able to wash from my mind. Horrible shit.
An experience like that can trigger many things. For me, it made it very clear to me how fragile we are and how quickly our time on earth can come to an end. Up to that point, I thought I was invincible from a health perspective, it was never a concern or an issue. Then it was.
That changed the way I view each day and the appreciation I have. Changed who I was, for the better. It also changed how I view my career.
I had two major takeaways. The first was that every minute is precious and I want to choose to spend that time working on the things I enjoy with people I admire. That made it clear that I needed to start something of my own.
The second was that I wanted to build a platform that could create career altering opportunities for thousands of people, directly. An opportunity engine. We spend so much of our life working, yet so many great people are never given a chance to fully apply their abilities and passion because they don't have the right platform. If I'm able to execute on Curious, it'll be a platform for those people to do their best work. A special place for special people.
That, to me, is a meaningful pursuit.
Crux points like this speak more broadly to the role of adversity in our lives. None of us would ever choose adversity like this if we could avoid it. But we can't avoid it, and when we get to the other side of it, we emerge as different people. The hard work is to interpret what it is that you experienced and use it to orient your life in such a way that you live more fully. That's the goal. To live a life that's full.
I'm very much a work in progress, but I'm grateful for my Crux points.